Nexus Blog

Living in Incongruity

Jenny Sheehan — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:05:00 PDT

Where are you acting incongruently with what you believe or espouse?
What does it produce in you to declare publicly that you are incongruent?
What happens in you when you own your system of incongruence ?

I had poignant moments during the CTI Summit last year at Marco Island. We were seeing powerful video of the collapse of the earth’s biological systems, having difficult conversations about the state of the planet, and feeling it all very deeply. Like others, I was aware of the irony of coming to this high-end venue, with its enormous ecological footprint, to explore actions that we can take to address the crisis.

Unlike others, I spent years leading groups on 100 mile canoe trips through the extraordinary wilderness that extends south, and which previously included the overdeveloped island on which our luxury high-rise resort sat. Walker and I spent our honeymoon paddling the Everglades, and I’ve done solo canoe trips through the vast estuaries and mangrove mazes of the Ten Thousand Islands.

I’ve seen flocks of white pelicans with ten foot wingspans, pink in the rising sun, gliding noiselessly 15 feet above our heads. Exulted at dolphins playing in our canoe’s bow wave. Swum in warm seas, a full moon overhead, watching phosphorescent green swirls sparkling off into the night from the movements of my arms. Watched alligators as we waited for the tide to turn so we could ride the ebbing waters through mangrove-lined tunnels to the Gulf. This miraculous world was what our hotel replaced.

The stark juxtaposition of the modern/materialistic/consumer world, co-existing side-by-side with the primeval wilderness of the Everglades, reflects the incongruity in which we all live. I am aware of my participation in this, my financial resources supporting a hotel that supplanted a wilderness that I deeply love.

We are all living on borrowed time. And, in spite of our growing awareness, most of us still contribute to our collective hurtling towards the brink.

While I consider myself progressive and ethical, it doesn’t take close inspection to reveal incongruities. Listen to the voices in my head: “Our businesses give 10% of pre-tax profits to social, environmental, and spiritual causes. ” “And, you own shares of companies that engage in egregious environmental and social practices. ” “We have been carbon-neutral for several years. ” “And, you installed two new air-conditioning systems last year. ” “Well, that was offset by the solar panels we put on the roof! ” “Yes, and you flew to Africa and went on safari. ” “Well, that was OK because I was going there anyway for work that benefited people and ultimately the planet. ” “Yes, but your wife and friends and father who joined you were just on vacation. ” “Yes, but we made donations to offset the carbon.“ Etc., etc.

The truth is, we all live in incongruity. Any of us can look and find examples. (“I love my husband. And, I was really snitty last night to him.” “I take my shopping bags with me to the store. And, I drove six miles to the store and back, using sufficient fossil fuel to manufacture a hundred shopping bags, to get birthday candles for my kid’s cake!” “I know I need to delegate this project to a staff member; but really I’ll do it better and faster.” When we begin to look, they are everywhere. We can’t avoid them, at least not completely.

So, what happens when we face our incongruities? When we witness not just one side or the other, but the intersection of them? The “system of competing commitments” that our incongruities reveal?

And then, what happens to us when we make our incongruities public? When we don’t simply bargain with ourselves internally, keeping our conflicting priorities secret? When we reveal our inconsistencies publicly, declaring and owning our messy edges as we seek to live what we espouse?

When we do this, our internal bargaining and raw contradictions exist in a bigger field. Seeing them as a microcosm of the larger world is a move towards integration, and invites a different kind of awareness within ourselves.

Here’s what I’m noticing. It’s much easier to feel virtuous for having solar panels on the roof than to declare, in the same post, that I’m flying to Alaska for a sea-kayaking trip this summer. I want to separate these: write about the solar panels on the Lodge website, and write about Alaska in a blog post. Putting them out to the world together feels a bit raw, as I acknowledge publicly that my actions are in a sense incongruent with what I espouse.

Facing these incongruities, allowing ourselves to be present with them, and becoming increasingly congruent is central to our integration process. We experience ourselves as an expression of the larger system of which we are a part. Not separate. Not righteous.

The world is living in us and through us, and this awareness begins to shape us in new ways.

Readiness

Jenny Sheehan — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:45:00 PST

We all coach people who are facing big decisions, or who seek support in change. We witness, in them, the dynamic tension between the comfort of the known, and the disorganizing and liberating experience of stepping into something new. We support our clients in their discernment.

And, of course, we work with ourselves around similar discernments. It is often harder to see the ways in which we ourselves hold on to a practiced way of being or keep investing in a narrative that is limiting.

In this light, I have been fascinated by conversations with several people about the EcoSomatic Leadership Intensive that Henry Kimsey-House and I are offering in New Mexico in the fall.

This work builds a deeply connected, EcoSomatic awareness, in which we experience ourselves at the “frothy edge” of a marvelous evolutionary story. (Literally, it took the universe 13.7 billion years to produce YOU!)

We explore the experience that we are expressions of the living earth, collectively responsible for authoring how the story unfolds from here. I mean, of course, not just our own individual stories, although those are part. Rather, I am speaking of the story of how we increasingly contribute to the unfolding of creativity and aliveness on this planet, rather than undermining it in the name of our habits and attachments.

In our audio podcasts and virtual conference, we have touched into this awareness. Several people have shared with me that they don’t feel ready or competent to access or hold this powerful perspective. And, so they question whether the Intensive is right for them.

This is, to me, really interesting. Actually, we don’t expect people to already embody what we’re moving towards. (We are works in progress ourselves!) Readiness is an outcome of what we intend, not a prerequisite.

I understand the need to assess our readiness for a big new commitment. (e.g., it doesn’t make sense to buy a house if we can’t make the payments, or to accept a job that requires experience we don’t possess.)

From a different perspective, any worthy commitment produces disorientation, and requires development, as we live into it. (Who could possibly be ready to have a child? While most of us assess our personal and circumstantial readiness before conceiving, every parent has also felt at times unworthy of the trust placed in us by the audacious act of having a baby. We gasp at the miracle of birth, and at the daunting responsibility that comes with it. Still, most of us grow into reasonable competence as parents.)

We acquire the competency for parenting through parenting, for leading through leading, for living through living.

We could wait until it’s too late (many people do!) to decide that we’re ready to have a kid, marry, launch a business, follow a dream, or allow the Earth itself, speaking its aliveness through our very being, to shape who we are and the commitments we enter into.

What assumptions do we live in about readiness? Does readiness mean that we already possess the competencies for a commitment? That we have confidence that things will go smoothly? Or, simply that we’re ready for the adventure? That we trust ourselves to be as resourceful as the situation requires, and that putting ourselves in the game is really the only way to find out what IS required?

EcoSomatic Leadership isn’t just about recycling or changing light bulbs or buying a Prius, although those generally are good ideas. Rather, it’s about living in the awareness of our place in things. It’s about recognizing that every moment matters. And, realizing that every action we take in a particular moment and over a lifetime is fundamentally authoring a grand and elegant story.

Any decision, any new commitment, will “bend the arc of history.” So, whatever commitment we are considering, how do we assess ourselves as ready? Is there some level of competency required to wake up and face the opportunity we are living in? Must we be worthy? Must we earn the right to enter the conversation?

How can it ever not be the right time for awakening?

EcoSomatic Leadership: Moving to Authorship

Jenny Sheehan — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:38:28 PST

We humans like to think we’re in charge.

We like to think that we’re making decisions, charting the course of our lives, being creative.

In fact, most of what we think, say, and do is driven by a level of habituation that we can scarcely imagine. We are, fundamentally, an extraordinarily complex collection of conditioned habits, laid in through a combination of genetics, culture, and psychological shaping. Everything we believe about the world, what is worth doing, and how to respond in life is embedded in physiology. As such, every perception and interpretation is a manifestation of particular groups of neurons biologically entrained to fire together. How we lead our lives is constrained by this truth: we can only take actions that our nervous systems allow us to take.

Meanwhile, an infinity of possibilities lies just out of reach… available to us in principle, but inaccessible because of our hard-wired predispositions.

Our favorite TV show, Brothers and Sisters, features basically likeable and good people engaging in behaviors that are both destructive and astoundingly predictable. We watch them on screen, practically leaping out of our seats: “Stop! Don’t do that! You have a choice!”

We all do such automatic behaviors; the main difference between them and us is that we get to watch them on TV. If this sounds grim, I apologize. While I'm not actually a proponent of determinism (the belief that our lives and destinies are set,) the truth is closer to this than most of us imagine.

Yet, we do have choice. It’s just that most of us are asleep at the wheel most of the time. The trick is to learn to witness ourselves, to watch ourselves on the screen of our awareness as we move through life.

Human development can be seen as a process of waking up to the choices that were there all the time. When we witness the nature of our habituation, when we open to the possibilities that our habits previously screened out, we have a moment of real choice.

As we develop, we see that we are the only person we could be: the perfect and inevitable product of the conditions that gave rise to us.

And, we are the author of our own lives. As we wake up to this choicefulness, we become less and less driven by our habits, and more able to consciously author.

We live in an extraordinary time, in which the fundamental structures of the environmental, social, and economic fabric that supports our culture and very existence are shifting in significant ways. We are also authors of the world, in the midst of this shift; every action that we take or don’t take affects the whole in a chain of causality that is inconceivably complex. A special responsibility comes with the recognition of this authorship; giraffes and slugs presumably also author the world in their own ways, but are not cognizant of it.

EcoSomatic Leadership requires that we awaken not only to the nature of our own habituation, but also to the global context in which we are living. Living in this awareness, we are connected to ourselves and to the whole living system of which we are a living expression. We become increasingly at choice about how we author. We evolve into living in a set of commitments that are relevant to the world that we choose to bring forward.

This is the fundamental work of our time.

Join Henry Kimsey-House (co-founder of CTI) and me in an on-going community to explore this. We begin with a virtual conference on Tuesday, Feb. 21. And, we offer an eight day intensive in New Mexico in September. Click for more on these events.

Respite, with Whales

Jenny Sheehan — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:17:01 PST

Our three week trip was, in part, a medical trip, and in part an experiment in living fully in the face of Walker’s MdDS.

The illness is not better, although she is more resilient in working with it. The only researcher on the planet studying this terrible affliction is at UCLA; we had an appointment with her that took us to the W. Coast.

With that as a starting point, we became resourceful. We put together frequent flier miles, a friend’s casita in Baja to stay in, good friends in Hawaii, and a daughter in SF into a respite experiment. It included our 27^th anniversary (Feb. 2,) for which we wished to celebrate with a time-out from the busyness of the lives we have created. We were in need of the peace of wildness. We were ready for the jaw-dropping majesty of being with the most magnificent sentient beings the Earth has every birthed: the blue whales, greys and humpbacks of Baja and Hawaii.

It is, generally, our intention to push back on the limitations that Walker’s condition imposes on us. We are experimenting with the boundaries of what we can do, while also respecting the fragility of her nervous system. We took this trip mindfully and slowly, knowing this is necessary if travel is to be possible at all. My habitual urgency to experience everything is being gradually replaced by deep gratitude for Walker and appreciation for what each moment offers.

The UCLA doctor generously gave us three hours of her time, an unusual experience in medicine. It was helpful to get her perspective and her confirmation of Walker’s diagnosis. At the same time, there are no miracles on the horizon, no approaches to treatment that we’ve not thought of or already tried. This was not a surprise, nor even really disappointing. We are still facing what we’re facing; life sometimes shows up in inarguable facts.

Regardless of what did or did not happen at UCLA, we are more alive from declaring it important to be in the presence of 50 foot long highly intelligent whales, who live as they have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and who celebrate, love their young, and thrive, for now, in a changing world. We are more alive from spending three weeks together, listening to what calls us, and being in wild places. We are more alive from experiencing ourselves as part of the whole of life: miraculous, changing, unfolding.

We are learning to let life live through us, enjoying the precious moments we have, being led by love.

Kissing a Whale

Jenny Sheehan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:25:00 PST

Yes, I had the wonderful experience of kissing a whale! My lips, her forehead. I avoided the barnacles, and her smooth skin was surprisingly soft, for a 40 ton animal. It was both mutual and truly a moving experience...[click on the picture to view slide show]

These beautiful grey whales migrate 6000 miles south from the Bering Sea in winter to Baja California, where we visited them. Adults weigh up to 35 tons, and can be 45 feet long. Almost hunted to extinction by the 1970’s, they have made a remarkable comeback and now number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Several hundred show up to winter in San Ignacio Lagoon, on the West coast of the Baja peninsula to overwinter and to give birth to calves that weigh 1 ½ tons. After barely three months of nursing and hanging out in the lagoon, these amazing creatures head back north on one of the longest migrations of any mammal on earth.

The Mexicans called the grey whales “devilfish,” because they were fierce fighters, and therefore dangerous, when harpooned. Around the time of their near-extinction in the early 1970’s, a San Ignacio fisherman named Pachico Mayoral noticed a whale approaching his boat. Afraid, he tried to get away, but the whale followed, staying with the boat for an hour, rubbing up against the boat, and clearly initiating contact. Sensing no aggression, Mayoral relaxed, and soon the whales were touching, and being touched.

A small eco-tourism business has since sprung up around the whales in this protected lagoon; 40 years later, Pachico still takes people out to meet the whales.

We went out four times with a guide from Kujimá. Each time, we were approached multiple times by whales, including a mother seeming to show off her calf. They came right up alongside the boat… popping up an eight foot head out of the water to look at us, diving, flukes rising and gracefully going under water, spouting inches from our faces. Sometimes there would be several right next to the boat, passing underneath, or bringing their huge snouts out of the water right next to us. They seemed to enjoy being touched. I kissed one enormous whale; it seemed silly at first, but as I kissed her, and put my arms around her nose, I had a very strong experience of awe, joy, and love.

Given the human propensity to project ourselves onto the world, it is easy to anthropomorphize their behaviors. We could, for example, spin a story that these whales understood they needed to connect to humans in order to survive. Or, that they learned to forgive and are here to teach us something about living in harmony. Or that they are inviting us to interspecies communication, and thus accelerating our own evolution. Maybe.

Perhaps they simply enjoy a trans-species emotional connection, and, similar to us, are moved by the experience of interacting with an alien life form, and by the discovery of a surprising intimacy that transcends their own species. (“So, how was that for you?”)

Or, perhaps they are simply curious, like us, about another unknown creature that thrives in an adjacent and unknown world and seems to enjoy interaction.

For sure, the whales initiated the initial contact, and are still in charge of the interaction. And, for sure, evolution has always moved forward by experimentation; the creative impulse to reach out, to explore, to try new things. Whatever is going on in this relationship, it seems to benefit both the whales and the humans.

In one sense, it is wonderful to have the opportunity to try to guess what is going on, and why the whales reach out so. We can speculate, and we can form interpretations that are inspiring and that imbue the experience with meaning.

At the same time, efforts to superimpose our interpretation on a phenomenon only reduce it. Like identifying a beautiful bird, doing so provides some reassurance that we are in charge of our world. At the same time, our experience collapses somehow. From an experience of mystery and awe, from pure seeing and pure experiencing, the natural instinct to interpret makes it somehow smaller, more intellectualized, more known.

For me, the experience with the whales was so rich precisely because it is unknowable. This enormous and mysterious creature invited touch, connected somehow. Why, I can’t know. It simply WAS, and I am different as a result. More humble. More grateful. More astonished.

Practicing Fluidity of Attention

Jenny Sheehan — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:15:00 PST

In 2005, Walker, my father, and I explored the red rock canyon country of southern Utah. We delighted in hiking through the strangely shaped formations, sometimes fantastic, sometimes whimsical. They fired our imaginations.

As I write this, I am in a plane, flying over the same country; red sandstone canyons are spread out below me in majestic patterns that reflect a story hundreds of millions of years old. Geology is revealed. From space, we can imagine it would look still different, perhaps a small reddish brown patch on the surface of our mostly blue and white Earth. We shift our perspective dramatically by moving to different vantage points.

In the blink of an eye, depending on how I orient my attention, I can experience myself as sitting in the airplane seat next to my wife, as hurtling through cold thin air in a fragile aluminum tube six miles above the ground, as traveling across a red landscape that slides past my window, as moving ever so slowly across one tiny corner of the Earth’s vast surface, or as being part of the Earth itself as we spin together through cold empty space.

In our North Carolina retreats, we discover how fluid our attention is, and practice how easily we can shift perspectives. We build this fluidity. In so doing, we become less attached to a particular view of things, and more able to access a perspective that is helpful at any given moment.

Try these time shifts to practice this fluidity. Orient your attention to the time of day you are reading this. (For me, right now, it’s 1:05 PM, shortly after lunch.)

Now, orient yourself in a calendar year. (It’s late January, the holidays are long gone, it’s a couple of weeks after my birthday, we are going on a trip, and significant events are approaching.)

Now, orient yourself in the timespan of your life. (For me, well past the half-way point, with fewer years to come than I have already lived, and the sense of quickening pace and the preciousness of my remaining time.)

Now, orient yourself at the leading edge of a 13.7 billion year evolutionary process that began with the Big Bang and now finds us at a precarious point in the story of life on Earth. Feel this in your bones. (For all of us, at the edge of the evolutionary story.)

Each of these perspectives is true. And, each informs us in unique ways, contextualizes our activities and our commitments differently, and directs us to different actions. At 1:05 PM, it feels important to finish this post so Jenny can get it out. On January 24, I know to submit proposals for a June conference in Chicago. At age 58, I have sweet urges to tell my wife of 27 years that she is a gift to me, and that I love being with her. And, at the leading edge of a 13.7 billion year long story, I feel called to orient my work towards the evolutionary shift that is critical for us all to make if we are to not be toast.

Which perspective is most helpful? All of them, really. Modern life tends to constrict our view. Responding to, say, the daily flux of emails narrows our sense of time, and insulates us from the more inspiring and generative perspective of our role as authors of an evolutionary shift. When we reside solely in this more constricted view, we are deprived of a narrative of relevance, and we organize around narrow actions that generally do not provide us with fulfillment or meaning.

It is life-affirming to develop our access to all of these perspectives. When we practice expanding the fluidity of our awareness, we become more creative and resourceful, and we live in increasingly bigger contexts that provide a deeper relevance and meaning for our actions.

How does the perspective of the time of day affect what you feel you should be doing?
How does the perspective of the time of year affect what seems important?
How does the perspective of where you are in the trajectory of your life change how you see?
What are you being asked as a co-author of a 13.7 billion year old story that is still being written?
And, what commitments might you make from each of these perspectives?

Welcome, EcoSoma

Jenny Sheehan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:40:00 PST

The trajectory of environmental, social, and economic change is inseparable from our own development as humans.

There is plenty of evidence that the recently dawned year will present extraordinary opportunities for choices that matter. On the menu this year? Presidential elections in a polarized US. Unresolved debt crisis in Europe. An extraordinary array of grassroots initiatives for social justice and global economic development. Accelerating species extinctions. Deteriorating relations with Pakistan and Iran. More extreme weather events. Women coming into more power. Melting Arctic ice.

The media grabs our attention on some of these. Others we won’t see unless we look. All are indicative of the tremendous spasms of change sweeping our earth. All provide opportunities for discernment and choices.

These dramatic events are the inevitable product of human habits. We interpret the world in particular ways, and take actions rooted in our interpretations. Our actions intersect with natural laws, and produce consequences. Since each of us is the perfect reflection of our history, we make the best choices we can see and act on, given our unique constrictions in how we see and interpret our world.

In a Buddhist sense, the collective mess that we have created is literally the only thing that could have happened. It is the only possible result of the uncountable “best possible choices” made by myopic and mostly well-intentioned humans, over generations and millennia.

We have all engaged in a certain detached observation of these phenomena. In so doing, we sometimes make new choices or respond differently.

We suggest it is more accurate, and more galvanizing, to experience ourselves directly AS the earth, and to invite the dramatic felt realization that we are both characters in this tremendous unfolding drama, and authors of it.

We call this way of being the EcoSoma: at home in ourselves, at home in the world. The EcoSoma directly experiences our connectedness and our aliveness in an astoundingly creative corner of the universe at a poignant time in the 13.7 billion year story of evolution, when that very creativity is in serious jeopardy. EcoSomas are authors of this story; our actions and commitments collectively create the story precisely as we live it. We don’t know how it all comes out. We do know we are authors.

Thus oriented, our actions, our commitments take on a different meaning. Awake to our context, destructive choices become impossible, and life-affirming choices become the only thing we can do. As developing EcoSomas, our actions increasingly align with these possibilities. We become generative authors of an emerging story.

This is the work of our generations.

The Hand and the Glove

Doug Silsbee — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:35:00 PDT

So, we live in this amazing new house!

Well, not really new, it was actually built in the 1920’s. But, new to us.

It’s a central move for us in a reconfiguration of our lives as a response to our emerging commitments. So far, we are really enjoying our new home, the neighborhood, and living in town near our grandson and ice cream and fun things to do.

It’s a very different kind of place for us. In our early years of being together, we lived in a very rough cabin with no electricity or running water. In winter, we kept the toilet seat next to the wood stove so that if the urge came during a ten degree night, we could take the seat with us and have something warm to sit on!

Now, we live in a rather grand, comfortable, large house in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Asheville. In between, we have lived in our artisan owner-built home and a remodeled 1950’s farmhouse.

It was never the plan to live in a grand home. Yet, here we are. While living here is enabled in a real way by having achieved some measure of financial success, we don’t confuse our home with who we are. We can see how living in a grand house could produce a narrative of superiority, just as living in a rough cabin could produce a narrative of poverty. Yet, those are just narratives. Ultimately, every situation is simply a context for experiencing ourselves.

A context evokes us, it does not define us. While I have lived in very different houses, who I am and whether I am fulfilled or not is not determined by those circumstances. I enjoy my hot shower in a tiled enclosure. And, I enjoyed building a fire under the old cast iron tub in the back yard for a hot bath outdoors in a snowstorm. While I can appreciate that flicking a switch on the wall turns on the lights, it is liberating to know that my happiness is not derived from, or even related to, that convenience.

I often speak with clients about the multiple roles in their lives. A client can be a leader, a husband, a father, a member of a community. Yet, it is helpful to be in the perspective that each of those roles is simply a context for practice.

When we confuse our context with our identity, the range of our seeing narrows and the perceived importance of any given event becomes artificially large. Our mental processes assume that our performance is a reflection on who we are; our well-being has become equated with our perceived success (or lack of it) in a particular context. This constricted way of inhabiting our roles makes us more anxious and less creative and resourceful; performance becomes existential.

As an alternative, we can build the awareness that we are not our roles. We are, in fact, a consciousness that expresses itself through the various roles in our life (wife, mother, professional, farmer, daughter-in-law, etc.) as needed, but doesn't identify itself as any one of these. Like a hand inserting itself into any of a series of gloves, the hand animates the glove, but is not the glove.

In this metaphor, the hand is our animating awareness, and the glove is simply what we’re doing at any given time. We can practice, and build, the perspective of ourselves as this larger awareness, and then each role simply becomes a context in which to see and witness ourselves as a contributor and a learner. (For those of you who have read The Mindful Coach, this is the idea behind the construction of the Seven Voices. The Master awareness (the hand) chooses the distinct and most appropriate Voice (glove) for any given moment in a coaching conversation.)

With this awareness comes freedom. I can love living in this house, but I don’t attach to it. Even in this grand house, I’m also a guy with nine goats.

I can play the role of a coach, a teacher, a father, a grandfather, a husband. And, there is a larger view of myself that abides, that is always available, that witnesses myself in each of those roles. In this view, I am contributing what is mine to do in each role, yet with a spaciousness big enough to encompass all of them.

Grounding in Not Knowing

Jenny Sheehan — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:59:29 PDT

What situation is maddeningly unknowable?
What, specifically, is impossible to know about this situation?
Accepting this not knowing, what opens for you?

Yesterday was a strange day.

Our beloved grandson, age three, had oral surgery under general anesthetic. For the doctors it's all in a day’s work. For his parents and us, cause for anxiety. How could this happen? How could this perfect kid need surgery? What is going to happen next?

The other day, a dear colleague pulled out of a joint project for health reasons; I had been very excited about working with her, and was upset that she pulled out, while also completely understanding her choice.

I notice my own body feeling more fragile, my sense of physical assuredness shakier than it used to be. Walker’s health is up and down; while she is more stable than a few months ago, there are more questions than answers. Last night was a bad night. There is no predicting what any given day will bring.

Moving into town has produced big change. And, I am seeing that risks beyond simply relocating will be necessary to create the new integration that I say I seek. I don’t yet know how to do this.

So, what to make of all this? I spent yesterday feeling off, ungrounded, vulnerable. I am experiencing a flux of events that don’t fit the world I construct in my imagination, the world I seek to live into. Yet each of them is a request for my attention, presence, decisions, and actions.

As I move into my later years, supposedly a Wise Elder, I still often feel singularly unprepared, and sometimes have the sense of my world wobbling on its axis.

In the scheme of things, my life is pretty smooth, and the perturbances I mention are relatively minor. Others deal with much more difficult and challenging circumstances, every day. Yet, in the midst of fragility and unpredictability arise precious moments of clarity and gratitude. When I get anxious about my grandson or my wife, right on the other side is the joy that comes from loving them. I worry. And, they’re here. And, I’m here.

We can’t know whether a decision or a course of action will turn out to be fortunate or unfortunate. We do know for certain that things are uncertain. Much is beyond our control, from our spouse’s health to the cast of characters running for President. Yet, in this context, we ourselves create suffering through craving a certainty that is not to be had. The acceptance of our not knowing provides a reassuring orientation in the inescapable ambiguity of our world.

For example, much of my suffering around Walker’s MDDS came from my fears about where it would lead. When we accepted that we simply did not and could not know what the trajectory of her symptoms would be, we could let go of that part, and simply be present with each other, in this moment. And, that is worth a lot.

Yesterday morning, all there was to do was to be present in the waiting room, being with the unknowable.

As coaches, we can ask ourselves, and our clients, “What can’t you know? What is unknowable? And, where is there liberation in not knowing?”

This begins as an intellectual inquiry. It becomes a somatic experience after the realization of how we ourselves spin unhelpful narratives around the inevitable uncertainty of life. Our body relaxes, simply being present right here, right now.

This doesn’t change the circumstance; it changes us.

Shifting Perspective

Jenny Sheehan — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:50:00 PDT

What situation are you in that feels stuck and unchangeable?
What is the re-circulating narrative in your mind about this situation?
What happens to your energy level, mood, and sense of possibility when you inhabit this narrative?
What experiment might access a different perspective?

Flying over the American West, I generally indulge my introversion by sitting in window seats and not talking to my neighbor. The views out the windows, however, are inevitably spectacular.

As I write this, a photographer and a former geologist, I am watching the windswept snowy ridges of Northern Utah slide by, with their intricately carved forms and occasionally reddish sedimentary strata adding a tinge of color to a brilliant white landscape. The world seems spacious, beautiful, and generally marvelous.

At 35,000 feet, it’s hard to remember last night’s difficult night with Walker. The complex and interconnected decisions we’re facing about lifestyle, medical treatments, and the future are still there, but I don’t feel lost in them in the same way I sometimes can.

It’s not that flying over Utah is hiding; in fact, I can see our situation rather more clearly from a distance. Here, it feels less overwhelming, and there appear more possible courses of action.

It is an unforgiving fact that we can rarely see our situations clearly when we’re in them. Making our subjective experience into something we can witness as object is the central move of human development.

Often, we’re so tangled in our own narrative about what’s not possible to discover that some of those limitations are, in fact, quite illusory. Getting perspective is critical in order to see where we are and what possibilities we might be missing.

To get a larger and more generative perspective, we can engage in any number of strategies. Doing these consistently helps strengthen the alternative perspective.

Engage in a rigorous inner practice of some sort. Meditation, self-observation, centering, perspective-shifting are some. There are countless more. (See Subscribe for more)
Specifically generate a set (say, five) of distinct alternative perspectives on your situation. See which are more liberating and generative, and which feel oppressive or limiting. Find more evidence to support the liberating ones.
Go on trips. Travel. Get out of your world, and see it from the outside.
Make a request of someone with knowledge of perspective-shifting or witnessing approaches.
Watch a movie or read a book that speaks to our situation in a different way, or offers a useful metaphor or role model.
Get exercise! Physical exercise breaks up our incessant thought patterns, stimulates creativity, restores perspective, and increases vigor.

In Wildness

Doug Silsbee — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:00:00 PDT

In July, some of you know I went sea-kayaking with friends in Newfoundland. Having grown up in the outdoors, and been a wilderness instructor and guide, this was coming back to my roots. These years, 11 days in wilderness is rare, and, from the perspective of a grandfather with an undeniably aging body, more precious than ever.

It’s hard to say why it feels so important to me to do these things. After all, my work is around recognizing and letting go of attachments. Having had my share of adventures, and since jetting around the world is decidedly not environmentally sensitive, it would be easy to say that the time for such trips is over, that it’s my work to let go of this attachment, and seek fulfillment in a wonderful home life.

Yet, at age 57, I am still grateful to find myself in wildness.

Living outdoors with good friends, some of whom I’ve known for over 30 years, is restorative. Decisions were elemental, considering wind and seas, possible campsites, staying warm and fed. We paddled, ate, organized gear, talked around the fire. It was easy, delicious, simple.

The icebergs, of course, were spectacular. The remains of a big piece of the Petermann Ice Shelf had floated South from Greenland over the past couple of years. This summer, they arrived. We saw giant slabs of white ice, up to a half mile long, and grounded in 300 feet of water. Their sublime shapes revealing their long history, the sense of enormity they convey is indescribable. They offer a presence and a scale that is hard to explain to those who haven’t seen them, although I tried. One evening, we floated, silent, in the intimate lagoon between three of these tabular bergs. It was magic.

And, we saw whales every day. Countless bald eagles. Porpoises, moose, puffins, a fox. All living along this rugged coastline of rock, heather, fen.

The last day, all there was to do was gasp, laugh out loud, and let tears of exultation run down our faces as we witnessed a pair of humpbacks playing. Fifty ton whales, breaching completely out of the water and crashing down in an eruption of cold spray. Doing headstands, flukes high in the air. Rolling onto their backs and slapping their pectoral fins on the water. Diving directly under our boats, ten or fifteen feet below us. They clearly were aware of us, never endangering us in the least, while offering us one of the great wildlife experiences of my life.

I came back, restored. It is in wildness that I remember who I am, where I most experience the earth living through me, where I feel my spirits lift and sense my connection with all of life.

********

For more, see Jim’s short video.

Ice, For Example

Doug Silsbee — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:00:00 PDT

We shape ourselves to fit this world
And by the world are shaped again.

- David Whyte

I’ve always loved ice.

I’m talking specifically about Big Ice. The ice that flows in cold glaciers down the highest mountains on our planet, on which exist the conditions for their birth. The ice that floats as pale giant icebergs on the sea. That stretches past the limits of imagination on the great icesheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Ice that floats in giant sculpted shapes, haunting, magnificent, mysterious; that cracked and boomed all through the short twilit night next to my campsite in Amitsuatsiaq in August of 2005. Ice that, in its very dying, reveals life.

We hiked to the edge of the icesheet in Kangerdlussuaq, on my first trip to Greenland in 1980. Here, humble before the Big Kahuna of the Northern landscape, we marveled at the whiteness stretching incomprehensibly past the horizon: vast, shimmering, empty, still, silent. Nearby, any illusion of stasis was shattered, all the daylit night, by the crashing sounds of giant blocks breaking from the edge. Later that month, Lars maneuvered his huge speedboat on the edges of Disko Bay through fields of broken ice and past huge monoliths of white and blue ice that towered over us. I was captivated, awestruck, newly in love.

North Atlantic icebergs began as snow that fell high in the interior of Greenland, accumulating year after year, century after century, until the ice was two miles thick. The spaces within and between snowflakes were pressurized by enormous accumulating weight, until they became tiny bubbles. (Thousands of years later, I laugh as millennia-old trapped bubbles of highly compressed air, small bursts of ancient atmosphere, pop and fizz as ice melts in my mouth.)

From inland, the ice flows many hundreds of miles to the coast, where eventually it breaks off in icebergs that float on the currents until they melt. (The Titanic had the misfortune to run into one of these Greenland icebergs, which apparently, through passive non-violence, won the briefest contest of wills.)

In these bergs one can see layers from the snow that fell tens of thousands of years earlier far inland in cold silent winters. Thick deep azure lines reveal where the slowly moving river of ice, making its way to the coast like a vast conveyor belt, cracked open only to refreeze in blue water ice.

Icebergs are beautiful beyond description. Some are massive slabs that rise up two hundred feet into the air. Others, gracefully carved by their journey at sea, show old waterlines revealed when chunks broke off underwater, the shifting mass then tilting and lifting underwater parts into the clear Arctic sunshine. Scalloped edges from the constant melting forces of waves and sun, blue lines of water ice cutting across white sails of jagged spires rising up into the sky… what cathedral made by man could improve on this constantly evolving landscape of ice and blue water?

Each piece of ice is the only thing it could be, perfectly reflecting its origin high on the Greenland ice sheet, the long slow journey to the sea, and its brief death dance in cold waters, slowly melting and being shaped as it moves towards certain dissolution.

******

Monday I leave for Newfoundland, where I’ll be going sea-kayaking with dear friends, many of whom I’ve known for 30 years. Walker has gracefully supported me in this long-planned adventure.

It will be a good summer for ice: a Bermuda-sized slab broke off the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2009, and has been making its way South since then. We will paddle for eleven days up the coast, next to humpback whales and, with luck, among the remains of this giant slab of ice. We will marvel at the raw beauty of this dynamism, and be moved by the epic story that is being revealed before us.

It’s in places like this that I remember who I am. The complexities of life drop away, and I am of the elements, a moving part of what is. I am witness to Big Time, and how I am shaped by landscape. I exult in my participation in a grand story vastly more mysterious and elegant than those I organize myself by much of the rest of my life.

Each giant piece of ice, each rock, each lichen and wave and mussel and fox perfectly reflects its deep history. And I mine. We are all shaped by the tides, the sun, the wind, and the currents that press against our sides.

******

More on the ice slab. A short video. And, a map of the iceberg concentration exactly where we’re going next week! Now, this will be fun!

Blast from the Past

Doug Silsbee — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 17:35:00 PDT

We left our home in Boone 16 years ago. For the 13 years before that, we had built the entire thing around us as we raised our children. Love, community and the craftsmanship of many hands are in every nail, board, and stone.

It’s on the market again, for a much higher price than we sold it for in 1996. Alisia pointed us to the realtor’s website, which has lovely photos of what was once our home.

Click on them. There’s the swing set, and the Easter House. There are the curved walls that I built, and Robbie’s beautiful stone chimney. The huge redwood beam that we lifted into place still caps the living room ceiling, and the long M.C. Escher print still runs along the south wall of the living room. Outside, the quartzite stones I hauled from the construction on Table Rock Road, a few at a time, still lead from the driveway to the front door.

Dick and Kate, who bought the house from us, have absolutely made it theirs. They closed in our upstairs porch, replaced the hot tub in the downstairs bath with a clawfoot tub, added photovoltaic panels. But the essential feel and beauty of the home is still an expression of the life we lived there.

The beauty of this house will be self-evident to anyone who looks. However, they cannot possibly know what stories those walls hold from the many years we lived there, or how we have been shaped by our living within them.

They cannot know that the house started as an 8x12 cabin that was built on the back of a truck, traveled to Guatemala and back, and fetched up on this hillside on top of 55 gallon oil drums. That we used to take long outdoor baths on cold snowy nights in a cast iron tub with a fire under it, watching the snowflakes fall.

They couldn't know how 50 people, accompanied by a bluegrass band and a keg of beer, raised a timberframe in a day, and then left us, in breathless wonder, to sleep that night on a piece of plywood high in the magnificent sculpture that had arisen in the woods. How the first winter in the timberframe, we would lie under six inches of quilts, shivering, listening to the wind blow panels of foam off the walls to shatter against the trees. How Alisia would sit on my lap and read books with me next to the barrel wood stove. And, how, pregnant with Megan, Walker endured the construction of the main part of the house, protected from the sound of saws only by a thin sheet of plastic, held by the countless friends that helped build the most beautiful house we’ll ever live in.

***********

One day in 1995, shortly after the house was really almost perfect, Walker asked me “what would you do if I weren’t in your life any more?” I said, “I’d sell this and move. What would you do?” She said, “I’d sell this and move.”

We had lived a terrific dream. By 1995, it had run its course and it was time to move on. A few months later, we moved to Asheville, and the next year, bought Bend of Ivy, where the Lodge took form as the next dream.

Every single time our dreams have become limiting, or outgrown, or stifling, we have found an opening into something new. As I look at the pictures of our old home, I feel nostalgia, longing for simpler and more raw times, pride in what we created in the vigor of such youth as I can scarcely remember. Reflecting, I sense something about how I came to be who I am. And, I know it was time to move on.

Now, Bend of Ivy Lodge is reaching a new maturity. Walker and I are hiring an amazing Site Manager who will be very good for this place. We will continue to be involved here, even as we author this new and unknown chapter together. All is good.

The aliveness of the creation itself is really what it’s all about anyway.

A Big Move

Doug Silsbee — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:10:36 PDT

We are very excited to announce our impending move from Bend of Ivy into Asheville. This is a major life change for us, and the start of a significant new chapter.

People we’ve told about this (including our kids) are often astonished that we could even consider giving up our life in paradise to move into the city. Yes, Bend of Ivy is an extraordinary, nurturing, and inspiring place. And...

Walker’s on-going health issues have made it very challenging for her to manage the day-to-day complexities of running an active retreat center. We see that moving into town can both relieve stress on her rather fragile nervous system, and create an opening for an amazing Site Manager who will take the Lodge operations to a whole other level. This will be good for the Lodge, and good for us.

Second, I burn my scant quota of extroversion quickly in my professional life. When it’s gone, I tend to isolate myself at home rather than engage in my community. If I extrapolate that tendency out ten or fifteen years, I don’t like what I see. Living in town will make it much easier to engage socially, go to cultural events, and be involved in our community while still having a quiet restful place for Walker’s nervous system to settle.

Third, living in a place that is also Walker’s business has exacerbated some patterns in our relationship that aren’t very healthy. To wit, she has been the primary driver of most decisions about the space we call home. My sense that I live in Walker World has strongly evoked my own tendency to defer in decisions and not take a stand for what I want and need. Our decision-making patterns have become ossified in ways that don’t really work for either of us. The move into town provides an opportunity to practice the joint creation of a lifestyle that works for both of us. We are being very conscious about this sensitive and rich aspect of the move.

Last but not least, we’ll be closer to our grandson Miles (and his family, of course!) Hmmm… we can pick him up from school, take him for ice cream, and hang out with him as often as we want. Now, that’s appealing!

In another post, I’ll share more about the particular house that we’re buying, and the remarkable story of how that came to be.

For now, I am energized by what is opening, and optimistic that this will be very good both for us and for Bend of Ivy Lodge. Now, gotta pack!

Congruence in Creation

Jenny Sheehan — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 07:49:57 PDT

I got a great wake-up call yesterday around congruence!

Generally, I am terrific at declaring commitments, and then fulfilling on them (even when the effort is considerable!) However, in the midst of developing the EcoSomatic Leadership program with my wonderful colleagues and friends, Henry Kimsey-House and Carey Smith, it became very clear that we were pushing a boulder up a hill.

Walker and I are usually in the middle of a lot. Right now, in addition to living with Walker’s neurological syndrome, we are in the midst of buying a house in town, orchestrating a move, hiring a Site Manager for Bend of Ivy Lodge, and the numerous other commitments associated with opening a significant new chapter of our lives.

Even before those developments, the timeline we had set for ourselves for designing, marketing, and running the EcoSomatic Leadership pilot in August had felt both possible and rushed. Personally, I have been experiencing considerable urgency around many competing commitments that feel both vital and insistent. And, in the background is the undertow I sometimes feel when I consider how to respond creatively to the human and ecological suffering in the world.

Certainly, we could have driven ourselves in order to "make this program happen." And, yesterday, we saw that the energy of "making it happen" is, in fact, an essential contributor to the global imbalances that the retreat seeks to respond to in the first place. We decided to postpone the pilot, and I contacted those who were already committed to inform them.

If EcoSomatic Leadership exists to reveal a new way of listening to our own aliveness and to what the earth is asking of us, then we as designers must practice this throughout the process of designing and extending our offer into the world. Yesterday, I witnessed my habit of pushing, the lack of congruence with the radical alternative that our offer represents, and the stress induced by the self-prescribed parameters we had declared. We saw that offering an experience of a new way of being in the world that has been created in an old way of being is incongruent and out of integrity.

I'm grateful to my partners Henry and Carey for the thoughtful discovery process that led to this decision. While our decision surprised even us, we now sense a new spaciousness around this as we practice listening into how this wants to unfold.

If, in this world, we are to create an ecologically healthy and spiritually fulfilling way of being, it will take root in practice and in present moment experience, rather as a concept or professed future possibility. In other worlds, it begins now, and with us. Gandhi’s oft quoted “We must be the change we seek in the world” speaks to all of us. Are we living in frenzy while espousing a more balanced way of being? Or, are we embodying what we espouse? When will we begin?

Henry, Carey and I expect to announce new dates for the pilot program after our design session, probably in early July. (Please subscribe to receive notification of the new dates.)